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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Place of the Lion,' Charles Williams weaves an enthralling narrative that juxtaposes the mundane with the metaphysical, exploring themes of idealism, spiritual awakening, and the conflict between the ordinary and the transcendent. Set in a suburban England that is quietly disturbed by the emergence of powerful archetypal figures, the book employs a unique blend of symbolism and allegory, as Williams channels his fascination with Platonic ideals. The prose is richly textured, resonant with philosophical inquiry and poetic imagery, reflecting both the literary tradition of the early 20th century and the broader context of Christian mysticism. Charles Williams, a member of the Inklings alongside J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, brought a profound understanding of theology and philosophy to his writing. His works are a testament to his deep engagement with topics of faith, ontology, and the nature of reality, which likely informed the creation of this novel. Williams' knowledge of metaphysical concepts is artfully illustrated through the vibrant characters and fantastical elements, making 'The Place of the Lion' a distinctive contribution to fantasy literature. This novel is highly recommended for readers seeking a thought-provoking exploration of metaphysical themes interwoven with folklore and British literary tradition. Those fascinated by the intersections of reality and the imagination will find in Williams' work a rich tapestry that invites reflection on the nature of existence and the quest for the divine. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Place of the Lion
Table of Contents
Introduction
What if the vast, shaping Ideas we treat as abstractions — strength, order, beauty, intellect — were to break their bounds and move through the ordinary world with the weight and authority of living beings, compelling everyone to discover whether their loves, loyalties, and ways of knowing serve reality or merely themselves?
The Place of the Lion is a metaphysical fantasy by Charles Williams, set in England and first published in the early 1930s, in the unsettled interwar years. Williams, associated with the informal literary circle later known as the Inklings, positions the uncanny not in remote realms but amid familiar fields, roads, and studies. The novel draws on classical and theological ideas while remaining firmly contemporary to its moment of composition. Its setting is not grand or exotic; the strangeness arises from the incursion of the numinous into the everyday, challenging the habits of a modern community and the presuppositions of its educated classes.
Without disclosing the book’s turns, the premise is simple and disquieting: a quiet English town begins to feel the pressure of presences that are more than natural, and the lives of a few men and women quickly become the arena of a larger contention. The title points to one dominant figure, a leonine power whose appearance signals that the ordinary order has shifted. Williams renders the disturbance with a calm, lucid voice that heightens the eeriness. The style is measured rather than melodramatic, yet the atmosphere thickens from uncanny hint to visionary intensity, maintaining narrative clarity while inviting philosophical reflection.
At its heart, the novel explores the relation between Ideas and instances: whether the patterns we name are mere labels for human use or the real scaffolding of the world. Williams examines the peril of an intellect that courts abstraction for mastery’s sake, and the countervailing humility that seeks alignment with what is. The book considers authority, beauty, and knowledge not as private possessions but as realities that demand right response. It asks how fascination can become fixation, and how veneration can become service, tracing the fine line between contemplation that transforms and obsession that consumes.
These concerns give the story enduring relevance. In an age crowded with systems, ideologies, and images that claim to explain or command reality, The Place of the Lion poses questions about what genuinely orders human life. It probes whether love and fidelity to the good are safeguards against being overrun by the very powers we invoke. It challenges the reader to discern the difference between reverence and self-exaltation, between study and manipulation. The novel’s emotional pull lies in seeing ordinary people face outsized meanings, while its intellectual appeal rests in the suggestion that truth is not constructed but encountered.
Williams’s craft fuses clear, unfussy prose with a symbolic density that rewards close attention. The narrative moves among domestic scenes, scholarly rooms, and open country, letting the landscape itself participate in the unfolding pressure. Dialogue is spare but telling, and the visionary passages are anchored in concrete detail rather than ornament. The result is a distinctive mode of fantasy in which metaphysical speculation is not an aside but the engine of suspense. Readers familiar with other twentieth-century British fantasies that mingle the spiritual and the mundane will recognize the lineage, yet the book’s austerity and focus are very much Williams’s own.
Approached as both a story and a meditation, The Place of the Lion offers a bracing experience: the wonder of encounter, the chill of exposure, and the relief of orientation. It invites readers to slow down, notice patterns, and let symbols do their work without forcing them into tidy allegory. The novel does not require specialized background to be felt; it asks only for patience and attentiveness. For those drawn to fiction that makes the invisible stakes of ordinary choices palpable, this is a compelling entry point into Williams’s imagination, and a provocative reflection on what it might mean to live under the claims of the real.
Synopsis
The Place of the Lion opens in a quiet English town where a small circle of students and amateur scholars share enthusiasms for philosophy, philology, and theology. The central figure is a thoughtful young man whose curiosity about metaphysical realities is tested by events that begin as rumors and minor disturbances. Friends and acquaintances, including a more impulsive companion and older intellectuals of differing temperaments, provide contrasting attitudes toward learning and power. The atmosphere is one of calm inquiry and provincial routine until strange signs intrude, hinting that the abstract subjects of their debates may be closer to daily life than anyone expected.
The first undeniable disruption appears at the edge of the countryside: an immense lion, too radiant and formidable to be a natural beast, is sighted moving with serene authority. Animals panic, roads seem to close without visible cause, and the air itself feels charged with significance. Those who glimpse the creature report not fear alone but an awe bordering on reverence. Ordinary explanations falter. The young scholar and his friend, drawn by curiosity and concern, investigate, while local minds argue over whether the apparition belongs to legend, hallucination, or some higher category. The town’s boundaries begin to feel less secure.
Conversations turn to Plato and the Idea of forms, once a topic for academic exercise, now an interpretive key. A reserved, learned observer suggests that primordial patterns—the Archetypes—can sometimes press near to the world of sense, with perilous consequences for those unprepared. Another figure, fascinated by magical systems and personal mastery, proposes experiments to attract or command such powers. Competing theories spark tension. The young scholar sees that intellectual pride and spiritual heedlessness can distort inquiry, yet he hesitates to judge motives. Meanwhile, the countryside grows uncanny, as if the landscape itself were reorienting around an unseen center.
The lion is not the only manifestation. An eagle’s vast shape hangs in the upper air with piercing stillness; a butterfly of impossible delicacy settles only to draw souls toward beauty without measure; a coiling presence suggests measured cunning and secret knowledge. Each appearance exerts a distinct pull, not merely on the senses but on character and desire. People begin to fall into patterns that amplify their dominant traits. What once were harmless fixations become gravitational. The scholar observes friends and rivals edging toward obsession, while the ordinary townsfolk, baffled and anxious, look for practical safety as paths and distances subtly change.
As pressures mount, the circle of acquaintances fractures. One companion, increasingly captivated by a personal ideal, slips away in pursuit of it, eluding appeals to caution. The scholar becomes aware that proximity to these presences heightens whatever one loves most, whether knowledge, beauty, or mastery. Physical routes out of the district close as if by an idea rather than a barricade, and travelers lose their bearings. Reports of disappearances and near-miraculous escapes mingle with implausible sightings. The scholar recognizes the need for guidance beyond clever argument, turning from debate toward counsel that can address the scale of what confronts them.
A quiet mentor—neither occultist nor skeptic—articulates a framework for understanding. The Archetypes, he explains, are not ornamental concepts but ruling realities; to meet them without order is to risk dissolution in what one seeks. Hierarchy matters: love must be rightly placed, intellect humbly aligned, and dominion acknowledged in its proper source. The lion, as the form of sovereign strength and protection, is not a thing to command but a presence before which lesser powers take their place. This teaching reframes the crisis. What is at stake is not the defeat of monsters but the restoration of right relations between mind and meaning.
With this perspective, the scholar sets out toward the locus where disturbances converge: an old house on the town’s outskirts whose library and grounds have become a passage for intensities. Allies gather and fall away, some drawn aside by private visions. The air thickens; time seems layered. Approaching the threshold, each person confronts an inward temptation shaped by an outward splendor. The journey is less a march than an examination of loyalties. Messages arrive by chance meetings, quiet prayers, and remembered texts. The scholar understands that any help he offers will be measured by his willingness to surrender false centrality.
The ensuing confrontation is presented less as combat than as decision. A wrong word, a grasping gesture, could yield a life to an Idea in its naked majesty. A rightly ordered love could allow the presences to pass without devouring. Within the charged house and its surrounding fields, the lion’s authority, the eagle’s clarity, and the butterfly’s allure demand placement beneath a higher claim. Acts of recognition, renunciation, and obedience determine whether the neighborhood is overwhelmed or steadied. Without detailing outcomes, the narrative tightens around the question of who bows, who clings, and how desire, disciplined or errant, shapes what becomes possible.
In its resolution, the book gathers its themes into a plain emphasis: realities precede opinions, and safety lies not in cleverness but in humility and right order. The town’s experience leaves the attentive changed, their friendships and studies recalibrated by the recognition that thought touches being. The Place of the Lion concludes with a restored sense of scale: everyday duties regain depth, beauty is honored without tyranny, and intellect serves rather than rules. Without disclosing final turns, the story’s burden is clear. It portrays the world as a meeting ground of forms and affections, where reverence secures freedom.
Historical Context
Set in contemporary England of the early 1930s, The Place of the Lion unfolds in a small market town bordered by fields and lanes typical of the Home Counties. The milieu is recognizably interwar: railways link town and metropolis, motorcars and bicycles share roads, and suburban villas press outward into older agrarian spaces. The intellectual atmosphere is also contemporary, with private libraries, theological debate, and amateur societies reflecting the era’s blend of scholarship and club life. Although the town is unnamed, its social texture—civic committees, parish churches, and modest academic circles—places the action within southern England’s prosperous yet unsettled landscape between the wars.
The First World War’s aftermath shaped British society between 1918 and 1931. Britain counted roughly 886,000 military dead, and public rites—the Cenotaph in Whitehall unveiled in 1920 and the Unknown Warrior interred at Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920—formalized grief. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919, yet victory delivered economic strain, a lost generation, and spiritual disorientation. The novel mirrors this climate of searching and vulnerability: its incursion of transcendent realities into an ordinary town dramatizes a culture attempting to measure everyday life against ultimate meaning, warning that trauma and skepticism can leave communities exposed to counterfeit certainties or to powers they do not understand.
A powerful undercurrent was the occult and spiritualist revival that spanned 1875 to the 1930s. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Helena P. Blavatsky, popularized syncretic esotericism from New York to Adyar, India. In Britain, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn emerged in the late 1880s, while A. E. Waite founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in London in 1915; Charles Williams entered this order in 1917 and withdrew in 1928. The Society for Psychical Research, established in Cambridge in 1882, and figures like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who promoted spiritualism in books such as The New Revelation (1918), made séance culture mainstream. The novel’s awe before archetypal forces, and its censure of reckless dabbling, reflect this milieu directly.
Religious politics reached a climax in the Church of England’s Prayer Book controversy. A revised Book of Common Prayer, backed by Archbishop Randall Davidson, was twice rejected by the House of Commons on 15 December 1927 and 14 June 1928, despite Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin allowing free votes. The debate exposed national divisions over ceremonial, authority, and the church’s relation to the state, with Anglo-Catholics pressing for richer liturgy and evangelicals warning of Romeward tendencies. Williams’s Anglo-Catholic sympathies and sacramental imagination inform the novel’s insistence on cosmic order and hierarchy; its vision of realities breaking into the ordinary reads as a defense of objective, sacred structure against politicized or utilitarian religion.
Economic crisis defined the book’s publication year. After the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Britain slid into a deep slump; unemployment neared 2 million by 1930 and exceeded 2.5 million in 1931, reaching around 2.9 million in 1932. The May Committee’s July 1931 report urged austerity, precipitating the National Government under Ramsay MacDonald on 24 August 1931. Britain abandoned the gold standard on 21 September 1931. These shocks shook confidence in liberal economic certainties. The novel’s spectacle of familiar structures failing when tested by greater realities resonates with this atmosphere of institutional fragility, suggesting that purely technical remedies are inadequate without moral and metaphysical orientation.
Industrial conflict peaked in the General Strike of 3–12 May 1926, when the Trades Union Congress called out key unions in support of locked-out coal miners. Transport, printing, and heavy industry slowed dramatically while emergency volunteers sustained essential services. The Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act of 1927 followed, curbing sympathetic strikes and political levies. This episode dramatized class tensions and the delicate interdependence of civic life. The novel’s threatened town, held together only by individual courage and rightly ordered love, reflects the period’s lesson that social cohesion is precarious: when foundational loyalties are distorted, households, workplaces, and parishes quickly unravel.
The interwar rise of authoritarian politics cast a long shadow. Benito Mussolini consolidated power after the 1922 March on Rome; in Germany the NSDAP jumped from 2.6 percent of the vote in 1928 to 37.4 percent in July 1932. In Britain, Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists on 1 October 1932, while eugenic schemes and technocratic planning influenced elite discourse. Although apolitical in surface detail, the novel’s lion as a figure of pure potency and rulership reads as a warning: enthroning abstract power—strength, purity, inevitability—can destroy persons and communities when divorced from justice, humility, and charity.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the era’s temptations toward reductionism, whether economic, ideological, or occult. It indicts the casual exploitation of spiritual forces and the complacency of class and profession when duty to truth is neglected. By confronting materialism with transcendent claims, it highlights the dangers of treating people as instruments of systems, whether markets or movements. Its vision of rightly ordered love and knowledge rebukes authoritarian dreams and shallow skepticism alike, demanding moral responsibility for power. In the unstable 1920s and early 1930s, this insistence on reverence, discernment, and service functions as a pointed admonition to the age.
Mr. Gollanz does well to reprint The Place of the Lion, first published sixteen years ago, in his Connoisseur's Library of Strange Fiction. A scholar, a poet and a novelist, the late Charles Williams was one of the most remarkable men of letters of our times. As a novelist he was entirely original, and in his novels he found place not only for his fantastic imagination but also for his scholarship and his poetry, besides wit and serenity of mood, the rarest quality in contemporary writing. His novels were always thrillers, but intellectual, philosophical, theological thrillers in which the super-natural agents of good and evil fight out their eternal battle for the soul of man.
In The Place of the Lion, the action of which takes place in a small town in the Home Counties, it is as though the Platonic Forms of the animal—lions, serpents, eagles, horses, unicorns—have come out of Heaven to draw into themselves all the earthly manifestations of their species and with them the souls of those men and women who seek the qualities symbolised by them. The painted veil that is life in Hertfordshire is being torn asunder by the reality behind it. Mr. Williams secures that "willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith" in the reader not by a careful attention to naturalistic detail such as Kafka, for example, used in his symbolical novels, but by a Blake-like hallucinatory quality of vision; he sees—and makes the reader see—with an almost overpowering intensity the Form of the lion, the serpent, the eagle and so on. So that to read Mr. Williams is not only to be excited; it is to be moved in a quite unusual way, to be made aware, momentarily at any rate, of the transitoriness and arbitrariness of the painted veil, to be convinced of realities that lie behind it. It is like living in a gallery of Blake's paintings. Mr. Williams was not interested in human nature for its own sake, but, as in this novel, he could create heroes and heroines of sufficient life and charm to carry his supernatural story. One day a serious estimate of Mr. Williams's work in fiction must be made. Meanwhile, one is grateful for the chance to read again this dazzlingly brilliant book.
The Place of the Lion
I. — THE LIONESS
From the top of the bank, behind a sparse hedge of thorn, the lioness stared at the Hertfordshire road. She moved her head from side to side, then suddenly she became rigid as if she had scented prey or enemy; she crouched lower, her body trembling, her tail swishing, but she made no sound.
Almost a mile away Quentin Sabot jumped from the gate on which he had been sitting and looked at his wrist-watch.
"I don't see much sign of this bus of yours," he said, glancing along the road.
Anthony Durrant looked in the same direction. "Shall we wander along and meet it?"
"Or go on and let it catch us up?" Quentin suggested. "After all, that's our direction."
"The chief use of the material world," Anthony said, still sitting on the gate, "is that one can, just occasionally, say that with truth. Yes, let's." He got down leisurely and yawned. "I feel I could talk better on top of a bus than on my feet just now," he went on. "How many miles have we done, should you think?"
"Twenty-three?" Quentin hazarded.
"Thereabouts," the other nodded, and stretched himself lazily. "Well, if we're going on, let's." And as they began to stroll slowly along, "Mightn't it be a good thing if everyone had to draw a map of his own mind—say, once every five years? With the chief towns marked, and the arterial roads he was constructing from one idea to another, and all the lovely and abandoned by-lanes that he never went down, because the farms they led to were all empty?"
"And arrows showing the directions he wanted to go?" Quentin asked idly.
"They'd be all over the place," Anthony sighed. "Like that light which I see bobbing about in front of me now."
"I see several," Quentin broke in. "What are they—lanterns?"
"They look like them? three—five," Anthony said. "They're moving about, so it can't be the road up or anything."
"They may be hanging the lanterns on poles," Quentin protested.
"But", Anthony answered, as they drew nearer to the shifting lanterns, "they are not. Mortality, as usual, carries its own star."
He broke off as a man from the group in front beckoned to them with something like a shout. "This is very unusual," he added. "Have I at last found someone who needs me?"
"They all seem very excited," Quentin said, and had no time for more. There were some dozen men in the group the two had reached, and Quentin and Anthony stared at it in amazement. For all the men were armed—four or five with rifles, two with pitchforks; others who carried the lanterns had heavy sticks. One of the men with rifles spoke sharply, "Didn't you hear the warning that's been sent out?"
"I'm afraid we didn't," Anthony told him. "Ought we?"
"We've sent a man to all the cross-roads this half hour or more," the other said. "Where have you come from that you didn't meet him?"
"Well, for half an hour we've been sitting on a gate waiting for a bus," Anthony explained, and was surprised to hear two or three of the men break into a short laugh, while another added sardonically, "And so you might wait." He was about to ask further when the first speaker said sharply, "The fact is there's a lioness loose[1] somewhere round here, and we're after it."
"The devil there is!" Quentin exclaimed, while Anthony, more polite, said, "I see—yes. That does seem a case for warning people. But we've been resting down there and I suppose your man made straight for the cross-roads and missed us." He waited to hear more.
"It got away from a damned wild beast show over there," the other said, nodding across the darkening fields, "close by Smetham. We're putting a cordon of men and lights round all the part as quickly as we can and warning the people in the houses. Everything on the roads has been turned away —that's why you missed your bus."
"It seems quite a good reason," Anthony answered. "Was it a large lioness? Or a fierce one?"
"Fierce be damned," said another man, who possibly belonged to the show. "It was as tame as a white mouse, only some fool startled it."
"I'll make it a darn sight tamer if I get a shot at it," the first man said. "Look here, you gentlemen had better get straight ahead as fast as you can. We're going to meet some others and then beat across the fields to that wood—that's where it'll be."
"Can't we help you?" Anthony asked, looking round him. "It seems such a pity to miss the nearest thing to a lion hunt we're ever likely to find."
But the other had made up his mind. "You'll be more use at the other end," he said. "That's where we want the numbers. About a mile up that way there's the main road, and the more we've got there the better. It isn't likely to be on any road—not even this one—unless it just dashes across, so you'll be pretty safe, safer along here than you will be across the fields with us. Unless you're used to country by night."
"No," Anthony admitted, "not beyond an occasional evening like this." He looked at Quentin, who looked back with an expression of combined anxiety and amusement, murmuring, "I suppose we go on, then—as far as the main road."
"Yoicks—and so on," Anthony assented. "Good night then, unless we see you at the end. Good luck to your hunting."
"It ought to be forbidden," a man who had hitherto been silent said angrily. "What about the sheep?"
"O keep quiet[2]," the first man snapped back, and during the half-suppressed wrangle the two friends parted from the group, and stepped out, with more speed and more excitement than before, down the road in front of them.
"What enormous fun!" Anthony said, in an unintentionally subdued voice. "What do we do if we see it?"
"Bolt," Quentin answered firmly. "I don't want to be any more thrilled than I am now. Unless it's going in the other direction."
"What a day!" Anthony said. "As a matter of fact, I expect it'd be just as likely to bolt as we should."
"It might think we were its owners," Quentin pointed out, "and come trotting or lolloping or whatever they do up to us. Do you save me by luring it after you, or do I save you?"
"O you save me, thank you," Anthony said. "These hedges are infernally low, aren't they? What I feel I should like to be in is an express train on a high viaduct."
"I hope you still think that ideas are more dangerous than material things," Quentin said. "That was what you were arguing at lunch."
Anthony pondered while glancing from side to side before he answered, "Yes, I do. All material danger is limited, whereas interior danger is unlimited. It's more dangerous for you to hate than to kill, isn't it?[1q]"
"To me or to the other fellow?" Quentin asked.
"To—I suppose one would have to say—to the world in general," Anthony suggested. "But I simply can't keep it up now. I think it's splendid of you, Quentin, but the lioness, though a less, is a more pressing danger even than your intellectual errors. Hallo, here's a gate. I suppose this is one of the houses they were talking about."
They stopped before it; Quentin glanced back along the road they had come, and suddenly caught Anthony by the arm, exclaiming, "There! There! "
But his friend had already seen. A long low body had slithered down the right-hand bank some couple of hundred yards away, had paused for a moment turning its head and switching its tail, and had then begun to come leaping in their direction. It might have been mere friendliness or even ignorance —the two young men did not wait to see; they were through the gate and up the short garden path in a moment. In the dark shelter of the porch they paused. Anthony's hand touched the knocker and stayed.
"Better not make a row perhaps," he said. "Besides, all the windows were dark, did you notice? If there's no one at home, hadn't we better keep quiet?"
There was no reply unless Quentin's renewed clasp of his arm could be taken for one. The straight path to the gate by which they had entered divided a broad lawn; on each side of it the grass stretched away and was lost in the shade of a row of trees which shut it off from the neighbouring fields. The moon was not high, and any movement under the trees was invisible. But the moonlight lay faintly on the lawn, the gate, and the road beyond, and it was at the road that the two young men gazed. For there, halting upon her way, was the lioness. She had paused as if she heard or felt some attraction; her head was turned towards the garden, and she was lifting her front paws restlessly. Suddenly, while they watched, she swung round facing it, threw up her head, and sent out a long howl. Anthony felt feverishly at the door behind him, but he found no latch or handle—this was something more than the ordinary cottage and was consequently more hostile to strangers. The lioness threw up her head again, began to howl, and suddenly ceased, at the same instant that another figure appeared on the lawn. From their right side came a man's form, pacing as if in a slow abstraction. His hands were clasped behind him; his heavy bearded face showed no emotion; his eyes were directed in front of him, looking away towards the other side of the lawn. He moved slowly and paused between each step, but steps and pauses were co-ordinated in a rhythm of which, even at that moment of strain, the two young men were intensely aware. Indeed, as Anthony watched, his own breathing became quieter and deeper; his tightened body relaxed, and his eyes left turning excitedly towards the beast crouching in the road. In Quentin no such effect was observable, but even he remained in an attitude of attention devoted rather to the man than the beast. So the strange pattern remained until, always very slowly, the stranger came to the path down the garden, and made one of his pauses in its midst, directly between the human and the animal spectators. Anthony thought to himself, "I ought to warn him," but somehow he could not; it would have seemed bad manners to break in on the concentrated silence of that figure. Quentin dared not; looking past the man, he saw the lioness and thought in hasty excuse, "If I make no noise at all she may keep quiet."
At that moment a shout not very far away broke the silence, and at once the garden was disturbed by violent movement. The lioness as if startled made one leap over the gate, and her flying form seemed to collide with the man just as he also began to take another rhythmical step. Forms and shadows twisted and mingled for two or three seconds in the middle of the garden, a tearing human cry began and ceased as if choked into silence, a snarl broke out and died swiftly into similar stillness, and as if in answer to both sounds there came the roar of a lion—not very loud, but as if subdued by distance rather than by mildness. With that roar the shadows settled, the garden became clear. Anthony and Quentin saw before them the form of a man lying on the ground, and standing over him the shape of a full-grown and tremendous lion, its head flung back, its mouth open, its body quivering. It ceased to roar, and gathered itself back into itself. It was a lion such as the young men had never seen in any zoo or menagerie; it was gigantic and seemed . to their dazed senses to be growing larger every moment. Of their presence it appeared unconscious; awful and solitary it stood, and did not at first so much as turn its head. Then, majestically, it moved; it took up the slow forward pacing in the direction which the man had been following; it passed onward, and while they still stared it entered into the dark shadow of the trees and was hidden from sight. The man's form still lay prostrate; of the lioness there was no sign.
Minutes seemed to pass; at last Anthony looked round at Quentin. "We'd better have a look at him, hadn't we?" he whispered.
"What in God's name has happened?" Quentin said. "Did you see... where's the... Anthony, what's happened?"
"We'd better have a look at him," Anthony said again, but this time as a statement, not an enquiry. He moved very cautiously nevertheless, and looked in every direction before he ventured from the shelter of the doorway. Over his shoulder he said, "But there was a lioness? What did you think you saw?"
"I saw a lion," Quentin stammered. "No, I didn't; I saw... O my God, Anthony, let's get out of it. Let's take the risk and run."
"We can't leave him like this," Anthony said. "You keep a watch while I run out and look, or drag him in here if I can. Shout if you see anything."
He dashed out to the fallen man, dropped on a knee by him, still glancing quickly round, bent over the body, peered at it, caught it, and rising tried to move it. But in a moment he desisted and ran back to his friend.
"I can't move him," he panted. "Will the door open? No. But there must be a back way. We must get him inside; you'll have to give me a hand. But I'd better find the way in first. I can't make it out; there's no wound and no bruise so far as I can see: it's the most extraordinary thing. You watch here; but don't go doing anything except shout—if you can. I won't be a second."
He slipped away before Quentin could answer—but nothing, no shout, no roar, no snarl, no human or bestial footfall, broke the silence until he returned. "I've found the door," he began; but Quentin interrupted: "Did you see anything?"
"Damn all," said Anthony. "Not a sight or a sound. No shining eyes, no —Quentin, did you see a lion?"
"Yes," Quentin said nervously.
"So did I," Anthony agreed. "And did you see where the lioness went to?"
"No," Quentin said, still shooting glances over the garden.
"Are there two escaped animals then?" Anthony asked. "Well, anyhow, the thing is to get this fellow into the house. I'll take his head and you his —O my God, what's that?"
His cry, however, was answered reassuringly. For the sound that had startled him was this time only the call of a human voice not far off, and it was answered by another still nearer. It seemed the searchers for the lioness were drawing closer. Lights, many lights, were moving across the field opposite; calls were heard on the road. Anthony turned hastily to Quentin, but before he could speak, a man had stopped at the gate and exclaimed. Anthony ran down the garden, and met him as, others gathering behind him, he came through the gate.
"Hallo, what's up here?" he said. "What—O is it you, sir?"
